Scandal's Reward Page 6

  “I’m not interested in the fashions in Paris. Are you going to just stand there making small talk and leave me trapped in this pool?”

  Dagonet walked forward to the edge of the water. “Of course not! I thought I might join you. It does look deliciously cool and inviting.”

  Catherine backed away. “You wouldn’t dare!”

  He smiled with real humor, as if her perception of his desire was nothing but illusion. “I would dare a great deal, Kate. But if you would never forgive me, the pleasure would hardly be worth it, would it?”

  “My opinion of you cannot matter a whit!”

  Surely he would not really step into the pool with her? Why must she do such crazy things? It had been a stupid risk to take. Such behavior could only invite the wrong interpretation. And to be discovered by Devil Dagonet! He was said to be a complete libertine. Hadn’t he already kissed her without regard to her feelings?

  The memory of that sensation, sweet and desperate, was her undoing. Catherine blinked back sudden tears. She took one more step back and lost her footing. With a resounding splash, she fell back into the water. She came up gasping, pondweed streaming from her face.

  Yet Dagonet had already turned away and was reaching for his coat. Only the splash arrested him. In one powerful movement, he flung the jacket aside and leaped into the water. He caught her by the hands and pulled her to her feet.

  “Miss Hunter! You are too precipitate. This pool is hardly deep enough for swimming.” He swung her into his arms and carried her to the bank, where he set her down on the grass. “I wish you’d waited until I could have removed my boots. It’s hardly comfortable to ride with one’s feet swimming in pond water.”

  He frowned with mock reproof, but his eyes were bright as he swept up the shawl that she’d left earlier beside her parasol and wrapped it carefully around her shoulders.

  Catherine trembled. “If you hadn’t interfered, sir, neither of us need have got this soaking.”

  Water ran from her muslin skirts to pool about her bare feet, turning the grass to mud between her toes. She was wet to the skin. She supposed she must be grateful for the cover that the shawl provided, but his shirt was also stuck to his chest, clinging to broad shoulders and strong arms. Firm, smooth muscles, like a fine horse, like a wildcat, like a statue of a young, naked man. She bit her lip and looked away.

  “Too true!” he said. “I’m amply rewarded for my disgraceful lack of sensibility. My breeches and boots are saturated. You’ve only to go back to the house and the sun is so bright you’ll be dry before you get there, but I must travel in the shade of the trees thoroughly stuck to the saddle. I’ve done it often enough before, but it’s not the most pleasant way to ride.”

  “What?” she said without thinking. “Do you make a habit of rescuing women from pools?”

  For a moment he seemed stunned into silence, but then he laughed.

  “I was referring, dear Kate, only to the times that I’ve ridden soaked to the skin by the rain. A soldier cannot choose the weather in which he takes out his horse.” His voice changed only imperceptibly. “The only other time that I had a woman to rescue from a pool, I apparently botched it.”

  The color flamed to her face. If she could have taken back her question, she would have done so a hundred times over. Poor Millicent Trumble had drowned not half a mile downstream from this very grotto. However guilty Dagonet might be, she hadn’t meant to deliberately refer to the old tragedy.

  He swept her a formal bow and shrugged. “I can no more change the past than you, Miss Hunter, but my sins are of a different order entirely, aren’t they? I would escort you to the house if I were able, but it would only compound the problem for both of us. May I bid you good-day?”

  He leapt lightly up onto the rocks that shaded the grotto. Just before he disappeared into the woods, he stopped and broke off a briar rose.

  Turning it in his fingers, he said lightly, “The single rose, dear Kate. Would you take it, I wonder, were I to give it to you?”

  He began once again to sing the words of the old song.

  “You’re impossible, sir!” she shouted, but he had left, the rose in his hand.

  * * * *

  Catherine hurried back to Lion Court wrapped in her light shawl without meeting a soul. She felt miserable. She bathed, washed her hair, and changed her dress with her head spinning. Dagonet obviously meant to haunt the house until he could speak with Mary about her sister’s death. What did he want to find out? He was known to be responsible for the girl’s drowning and he seemed to accept the blame without question. What could he hope to discover that could make any difference?

  Well, it was none of her business and she would put him out of her mind.

  Yet she was not to be allowed to forget about Devil Dagonet for very long.

  Gravel crunched as the carriage pulled up in the drive. Catherine ran downstairs and found the family in the drawing room. Sir George was stomping up and down, his face suffused with indignation.

  “. . . and Major Cartwright had the damned impertinence to ask me about Dagonet,” he said. “What do you think of that, Mama?”

  “Oh, dear! I thought you were talking about horses . . .”

  “The story is all over the village and it makes me look a dashed fool. Why the deuce can’t you keep your mouth shut, Charlotte?”

  Charlotte Clay pursed her lips. “Well, I think the neighbors have the right to be warned that Devil Dagonet is in the country, George. Mr. Clay believed in plain speaking and I follow his example. I gave only the broadest outlines of what happened, after all, but if our cousin acts the common highwayman, he must expect his name to be dragged through the mud.”

  “Oh, not a highwayman, surely?” Lady Montagu said tentatively. “We were in the drawing room when Dagonet came in and took the jewels. I don’t think we should indulge in calumny.”

  “Calumny! He’s been a damned thief since he was a boy, Mama! Good Lord, don’t you recall how he tore out all my trap lines and released the rabbits out of the nooses? Father tied him to the post in the barn and beat him with the horsewhip, but he wouldn’t stop it.”

  “Your trap lines were disgusting, George,” Charlotte said. “A low poacher’s trick. Why Papa should indulge you in something so unsporting, I cannot conceive. Mr. Clay would not have approved, I’m sure.”

  “I didn’t set them where you or Mama could have found them. Anyway, it was just a boy’s game. Dagonet had no right to interfere.”

  Lady Montagu seemed about to weep. She lay back on the sofa and waved Catherine to come to her. “Oh, Miss Hunter, I have such a headache . . .”

  Catherine softly massaged her mistress’s shoulders, but she felt almost faint.

  George had set cruel wire traps for rabbits, yet Charles de Dagonet had risked a beating to destroy them. As Papa had said, he hadn’t lacked courage, a boy who—whatever his athletic prowess—also wrote music and read the great poets. He must have hated to see suffering in a poor dumb animal to have risked intervention, knowing that Sir Henry Montagu would thrash him for his mercy like a common criminal. A terrible and bitter humiliation, surely, for the young pride that must have lain like an ocean behind those eyes. How else had he suffered with his violent uncle? She had never forgotten her own fear of Sir Henry when she and Amelia had encountered him in the grotto as children.

  Charlotte sniffed. “Well, if Father beat him with a horsewhip, I’m sure he deserved it.”

  Sir George laughed. “More than once! Mama would have stopped it if she could, wouldn’t you, Mama?”

  Lady Montagu sat up and Catherine’s hands fell away. Her heart felt numb.

  “Oh, my! I couldn’t really countenance it, my dears. How could I? It only made him the more determined, which your late father could never understand. Dagonet had an implacable will, even then. It was cruel treatment, yet the boy laughed at it and invited more. My poor sister’s only child!”

  “Don’t be sentimental, Mama!” Charlotte said. �
��If you ask me, Devil Dagonet deserved far more than a horsewhipping. After he drowned that servant girl, he should have been hanged. A man who would take advantage of a poor maidservant in his own house is no better than a dog—”

  “Miss Hunter!” Sir George Montagu interrupted his sister mid-sentence.

  Catherine looked up, her heart pounding.

  George was frowning at her. “Have you sent out the invitations to Mama’s dance yet? There’s some dashed boring names that I want to strike off the list.”

  Chapter 6

  The day after the last harvest had been brought in, the first storms of autumn raced up the Bristol Channel. Torrential rain beat at the Lion Court windows all week, keeping Catherine miserably trapped indoors.

  Yet now the sun shone like a benediction overhead—and it was her free day.

  She ought to feel nothing but pleasure in this outing, yet Catherine felt haunted, filled with disquiet. She wanted to stride away forever, walk off into the sky and leave all her concerns behind. Instead, she was walking sedately up onto Exmoor with her sister Amelia at her side.

  Wild herbs and flowers scented a small breeze dancing over the moor.

  The path was slick, almost dangerously so in places. Catherine glanced down at her walking boots. Like Amy’s, the hem of her plain muslin dress was heavy with mud.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you told me, Cathy!” Amy seized her sister’s hand, forcing Catherine to look at her. “Dagonet destroyed those rabbit traps even though it earned him a beating every time? That was incredibly brave, don’t you think? Even if it can’t alter or excuse what he’s done since, it must cast a more favorable light on his character. You do agree, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Catherine said with a wry smile. “I’m trying to be scrupulously impartial, you see, so I thought I should set at least this part of the record straight.”

  Amy had seemed uncomfortable ever since they’d left Fernbridge, but now her face lit up. “But it counts for so much when a man is kind to animals. I think that says something incredibly profound about his true nature. Surely you cannot believe him really cruel, after that?”

  “I don’t know,” Catherine said. “Perhaps it only compounds the mystery, that such a boy would grow up to be such a rogue.”

  “Perhaps we’ve judged too harshly all along, Cathy,” Amy said earnestly. “It’s so easy to blacken someone’s name.”

  Catherine bit her lip. She could never tell Amy about the pool, or the night when she’d discovered him at Lion Court reading poetry. The pain in her heart was hers alone. If only his stark history could be so easily explained away!

  “Yes, but Millicent Trumble died because of him, Amy. He doesn’t dispute it, and I myself witnessed him stealing the jewels from his own family.”

  “We can know nothing of what truly happened, though, can we? I cannot believe him such a blackguard.”

  “Whyever should you defend him, Amy? It can mean nothing to you.”

  Amelia blushed and looked away. Her meeting with Dagonet had impressed her more than she could say. If he was David’s friend that was good enough for her. Besides, he really was so much more handsome even than David; it was no wonder that women lost their hearts over him. Indeed, she was glad she herself was already so much in love. The two girls strolled along in silence, each lost in her own thoughts, when two horsemen cantered unseen up onto the ridge behind them.

  * * * *

  “Pull up, Morris! ‘She walks in beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies; / And all that’s best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes;’ My friend, your beloved walks below.”

  Captain Morris rode up beside Dagonet and looked down on the Hunter sisters. Amelia’s ringlets shone beneath her bonnet like bright metal in the sunshine.

  “Don’t act the fool, Dagonet!” he said good-humoredly. “If you must quote the latest poets at every turn, at least choose something more appropriate. Amelia’s as blond as daylight.”

  “Why so she is! If Byron is not apt for her, then how about Wordsworth? ‘But, O fair Creature! in the light / Of common day, so heavenly bright, / I bless Thee, Vision as thou art!’ Let me silently depart and you may ride down and greet the Vision and her sister, who—if you hadn’t noticed—is dark.”

  Morris swung his riding crop and gave Dagonet’s mount a sound thwack across the rump. Laughing, Dagonet kept his seat easily as the gray bucked, then touching his own crop to his hat in salute, he rode away down the hill. Captain Morris trotted in the opposite direction to join the ladies. In a few minutes, dismounted and leading his horse, he strolled beside them up the moorland track.

  Amelia was radiant in David’s company. Catherine was glad enough to walk ahead to allow them some privacy. She tried to concentrate on the bright moor and the lovely day, though she still felt a little shaken. Just because Dagonet had willingly suffer a beating for the sake of a rabbit? She shook her head. He may have been kind to animals, but he had not shown her much mercy.

  Someone shouted. Catherine looked around. A boy was running toward her across the heath, waving his cap and yelling something unintelligible at the top of his lungs.

  “Good Heavens!” She called back to Amelia and Captain Morris. “It’s one of Westcott’s shepherd lads. Something must be wrong.”

  Catherine picked up her skirts and raced to meet the boy.

  His voice came in gasps. “Please, ma’am, there’s been a cave-in down at the Warrens and master’s best flock is all swallowed up.”

  Her heart began to hammer. “Take a deep breath, Tommy,” she said, “and explain exactly what’s happened. Mr. Westcott’s sheep are in trouble?”

  “Aye, ma’am! Right by the old minehead where our flock liked to shelter. The stream was all swelled up with rain and it cut down into an old mine shaft. Now the ground’s fallen in and taken our flock in with it. There’s a great pit of water, as used to be a meadow, but the sides are steep as steeples and slick as butter, so the sheep can’t get out. It’s the prize ram and ewes, ma’am. Drowned!”

  “What has happened?” Captain Morris had hurried up behind her with Amelia on his arm.

  “A disaster of the first magnitude! A mine shaft has collapsed at the Warrens and a flock of sheep is drowning in it. Captain, you must take your horse and do what you can. Tommy here will show you the way. Amy and I will follow as fast as we can.”

  Morris exchanged one glance with Amelia, then leaped onto his horse and swung the boy up behind him. The ladies, running as best as they might in their long skirts across the rough grass and heather, raced after them. By the time they reached the ridge above the little valley known as the Warrens, Catherine was gasping for breath. Amelia, panting hard, clutched at her sister’s arm. An open crater yawned in the green valley below them.

  “Oh, Cathy, I can’t run another step. I’ve the most dreadful stitch. You go on! Oh, what a horrid scene!”

  Catherine took it all in with one horrified glance. A maze of abandoned tunnels lay beneath this part of the moor. The stone mine buildings had been boarded up long ago, but sheep often sheltered against their ruined walls. The little stream, which had once meandered peacefully past those ruins, had swelled to a torrent in the recent storms. That torrent had cut down through the roof of some underground chamber, making it collapse, then filled the pit to form a deep pool, the water’s surface ten or fifteen feet below the remaining meadow.

  Today the stream had shrunk once again to a rivulet, but its water splashed down into the pool over sides that were gashes of rock and raw earth, as slick, as Tommy had said, as butter.

  And among the clumps of grass and mud floating in the resulting morass, there struggled, bleating piteously, the heavy bodies of Farmer Westcott’s best flock.

  “The first rockfall must have blocked the outlet,” Amy said. “Otherwise the water would have drained away, surely?”

  As she spoke, a large chunk of earth gave way and slumped into the mass of drowning sheep.
Amy gasped and put both hands over her mouth.

  “Indeed,” Catherine said grimly. “And that blockage could fail at any moment if the walls keep collapsing like that. In which case, sheep, water, mud and stones will all be sucked down into the deep mine shafts below. We must do what we can to help.”

  For the sheep had not been abandoned to their fate. Farmer Westcott in his homespun smock stood near the edge of the pit, his white hair bright in the sun. Tommy knelt beside him, peering over the edge. Two black-and-white dogs, ears pricked, quivered at their feet, yet lay still.

  Captain Morris had already tied his horse to a tree a safe distance from the disaster.

  A second horse, a gray Thoroughbred, stood idly cropping grass a hundred feet away.

  Morris was now running toward the ruins. A gentleman, stripped to his shirtsleeves, stepped out to meet him. Catherine had no difficulty in recognizing the arrogant turn of the head, or the waves of dark hair. It was Devil Dagonet.

  He called instructions to Westcott and Tommy, who hurried into the ruins to join him, the dogs at their heels. The two gentlemen, dragging one end of a length of thick rope, then ran out to the edge of the crater.

  Catherine slithered on down the hill, leaving Amelia clutching her ribs on the ridge top. This was no time for foolish emotion. She must try to help.

  Dagonet had already belayed the other end of the rope around a heavy timber, set fast in a solid block of masonry. Tommy and Farmer Westcott were jamming some loose boards across the broken walls to form a makeshift pen.

  Catherine stopped, bent double, her breath gone. Dagonet and Morris had their backs to her, and Dagonet was stripping off his boots. No one seemed to have noticed her.

  The drowning flock struggled and fought. Waves slapped against the muddy walls. Large bubbles gulped to the surface.

  Morris caught Dagonet by the arm. “For God’s sake, sir! The whole thing could cave in at any moment. You risk your life for a bunch of dumb sheep.”